A mercenary blog

February 18, 2015

Man, what a crazy time it's been since my last post! At the time I was in the process of being interviewed for a company in San Francisco, but I kept it very close to my chest because I didn't want to jinx it! I didn't even really talk about it with my friends. But, now I can say that I accepted the offer and will be moving from the Atlanta, Georgia area and moving to San Francisco! It's all very exciting and very hectic because it's happening so quickly! I've been spending most of my days trying to figure out what I'm packing, trying to offload things that I'm not (speaking of which, anyone want to buy a gaming laptop?), and scouting out places to live once I get there. The rest of the time I'm trying to spend hanging out with friends and family before I go. I'll certainly visit, but I doubt I'll see my friends in this area more than once or twice a year, so I really want to cram that time in now!

That certainly doesn't mean that I haven't been busy with EVE though! And while I haven't been able to play much because of everything going on, I've been able to get a lot done still! First off, our IT infrastructure is humming along! N'hoj Greb, the legend, has created a custom authorization for us and it's in its final stages. It's pretty nifty and uses a single sign on method which we really like. Now, when I say "single sign on" this may not be the absolutely correct terminology. What I mean is that you don't have to login twice like you do in the Brave Auth, for instance, where you have to login once to the auth and then again into the tool you want to use. For now, our tools are pretty light, consisting of automated Slack invitations for the alliance, Teamspeak authorization, and automatic forum groups. We'll likely look to expand this shortly, and I may actually try and wrangle Greb into doing the Noir. Academy project I've been working on instead of outsourcing it.

Speaking of forums, we're looking at moving over to Discourse from our current vBulletin forum. It's got a very modern feel, and some really nice tools and nifty usage improvements like live comments (the ability to @name), live updates, notifications, and being able to browse the forums while leaving a comment. It takes some getting used to, it really looks different, but I think it'll be a good solution if we can make the forum usergroups work the way we need. We may have an extra surprise for everyone if we end up using Discourse. I wont't say any more than that for now, sorry!

Wacktopia, also a legend, implemented Certificates into Fleet-up the other day, which is an absolute Godsend for me. In Noir. Academy we have a required training plan to ensure that graduating pilots mesh well with the doctrines we have in Noir. We don't want anyone to feel left out, so it helps mitigate that as much as possible for low skill point pilots. Until Certificates, we had to get an eveboard from students and manually compare the skills. Now, I've loaded up the skill plan inside a Certificate and it'll tell me exactly what pilots have completed the plan (and you can load up as many as you want), what percent of the plan they've completed, and how long it will take them to complete it. Saves so much time!

Seriously, if you use Fleet-up and you have an idea for a useful feature, send Wacktopia and EVEmail. He's really good about implementing useful things super quickly. His love and dedication to this platform is so evident in how hard he's worked at it, and I can't commend him enough.

Speaking of Wacktopia, he directed my attention to an article that Scaurus wrote on his blog Just for Crits regarding CSM candidate analyses. I really appreciate his analysis of me, and I hope you'll read his thoughts on my candidacy! I truly hope that I'll have an opportunity to not only work towards making EVE a more fun game, but also to help mercenaries remain a inmportant pillar of EVE. I hope there aren't any snafus this year. Last year my application wasn't processed at the same time as a lot of the other candidates to no fault of my own.

As an alliance, we've spent the last couple of weeks flying with one another, trying to get to know everyone in the alliance better, and Alek thinks we're at a point where we can start to wind that first chapter down and begin to ramp up our contracts again. I have to agree; we're all really excited to take on a new challenge!

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